1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to parallel optics interconnect devices and more specifically to fiber optical engines.
2. Background Art
In the transmission of signals by optical fibers, it is necessary to convert the optical signal composed of light or photons into electrical signals and electrical signals into optical signals.
The vast majority of products on the market today for accomplishing the conversion between optical and electrical signals utilize a combination of discrete components. The discrete components include active and passive elements. Active elements for transmitters use discrete light-emitting devices, which could be light-emitting diodes or lasers, to convert electric signals into optical signals. Often, the lasers are semiconductor lasers of either an edge emitting or surface emitting nature. Active elements for receivers use photodetectors to convert optical signals back into electrical signals. Passive elements are discrete lens elements that could include conventional refractive optics or diffractive optics. In fiber optics the lens elements are of a very sophisticated nature generated using computers, and are typically called xe2x80x9ccomputer-generatedxe2x80x9d optics. In addition, sophisticated electronics are required, usually in the form of integrated circuits, which once again have active and passive elements.
Because the current designs are a conglomeration of discrete elements, there are multiple packages that contain the various elements. This causes farther problems in parasitic inductance and capacitance introduced by the packages, which leads to performance limitations.
All the elements must be assembled in a very precise manner into modules. Typically, all the elements need to be aligned and placed to better than several microns accuracy in a high volume manufacturing environment. Therefore, manufacturing as well as the design of these modules is extremely difficult and time consuming, as well as low yielding.
The leading edge of the art for fiber optical devices today is 10 gigabits per second in a single serial channel. It requires a very expensive and exotic design and is not amenable for high volume manufacturing.
Recently, a new market has been developing, which is called parallel optics where a single fiber optical module contains multiple channels of optical paths. All of the current products are single channel receive-only, transmit-only, or receive-and-transmit within a single module. New parallel optics require up to twelve channels in a same physical space as a single channel module. This presents a major roadblock since conventional designs and manufacturing techniques have been found to be inadequate to meet the physical space challenges while maintaining any significant degree of manufacturability. Yield is low which means the end-product cost is extremely high.
Solutions to these problems have been long sought, but have long eluded those skilled in the art.
The present invention provides for a fiber optical engine and manufacturing method therefor with an optical element having an optical substrate and optics. An opto-electronic element, which converts between light and electronic signals, is secured to the optical substrate and is passively aligned with the optics. An integrated circuit for controlling the opto-electronic element is secured to the optical substrate. An electrical substrate is secured to the optical element. The fiber optical engine is capable of high giga-Hertz (GHz) frequency operation while being manufactured using commercially available materials, equipment, and high volume production processes. It can also be made smaller and requires less alignment work than conventional systems.
Certain embodiments of the invention have other advantages in addition to or in place of those mentioned above. The advantages will become apparent to those skilled in the art from a reading of the following detailed description when taken with reference to the accompanying drawings.